The individualized alcohol Stroop task: no attentional bias toward personalized stimuli in alcohol-dependents

This study aimed to investigate attentional bias in alcohol-dependent patients and control participants with regard to individualized (specific) and nonindividualized (general) alcohol-related words. First, it was assumed that alcohol-dependents rather than control participants are more distracted by alcohol-related words, particularly individualized alcohol-related words, than by non-alcohol-related words. Second, words which are derived from participants' individual drinking experiences were assumed to induce the highest Stroop interference over all participants. Alcohol-dependent patients (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, n = 39) and healthy control participants with a moderate consume of alcohol (n = 33) completed a modified alcohol Stroop task based on word stimuli derived from four categories: neutral versus negative and specific versus general alcohol-related words. While alcohol-dependents showed similar RTs in the different word categories, control participants showed the slowest reactions after presentation of specific alcohol-related words. Generally, alcohol-dependents had slower RTs than controls did. The results do not corroborate the hypothesis of increased interference caused by specific alcohol-related words in alcohol-dependents-instead, this presumption seems to apply to the control participants only. As we did not find any special impact of personally relevant alcohol-related words outclassing the influence of preselected alcohol-related words in the patient group, the benefit of individualized stimuli should be reconsidered. Our results do not support the relevance of attentional retraining programs.